Robot uses X-rays to debone 500 pork ham thighs per hour

Mayekawa, a Japanese robotics company that revolutionized the deboning of chicken legs, has now produced an amazing and scarily efficient pork thigh deboning robot. While skilled butchers can debone around 50 hams an hour, the HAMDAS-R can do no less than 500. HAMDAS-R doesn’t care about the near-freezing temperatures used in meat processing plants, either.

At this juncture, you should watch the videos below. The first is a small news report that details the technology behind the robot, and the second is a promotional video from Mayekawa. Both videos are fairly graphic, but there’s no blood.

The HAMDAS-R is basically a knife on the end of a very maneuverable robotic arm, with springs either side of the blade that mimic the suppleness of human wrist movement. The springs let the knife more closely follow the contours of the bone and the ‘grain’ of the meat, to increase overall efficiency. The key to HAMDAS-R, though — and the reason that this is such a big development — is that it uses X-rays to analyze each and every ham on the production line.

No pork thigh is the same, you see, which is why skilled human workers have until now been required. With X-rays, though, the robot can accurately detect the shape of the joint, and thus closely imitate the work of human workers. Using X-rays, the control system finds eight markers to get as close to the bone as possible — and though HAMDAS-R is approaching the low level of waste meat created by human workers, it still has a little way to go. It goes without saying, but the robot can also automatically detect whether it’s looking at a left or right leg.

The news report finishes by saying that the HAMDAS-R is already very popular in Europe — and 11 other countries, including the US, Germany, and Brazil, are looking at investing in the machines. Presumably Mayekawa is now working on the deboning of other pieces of meat

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